1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a computer controlled filter system and pipeline architecture to detect and remove noise artifacts in signals in real time, primarily but not limited to video signals.
2. Brief Description of the Prior Art
Advances in technology have made it possible to store electrical signals and primarily electrical video signals digitally, such as on a compact disk (CD) read only memory (ROM). For many purposes, in order to store a sufficient amount of digital information on a CD ROM, it is generally necessary to compress the digital data. This is accomplished by removing data which is unnecessary or redundant as well as removing data which will not dramatically affect the quality of the reproduced video and/or audio, it being understood that the term "quality" can vary in accordance with personal desires or specified requirements. At present, data can be extracted from a CD ROM at a maximum data rate of about 1.5 megabits per second. This is a very low data rate and is generally insufficient for providing acceptable quality live video. For this reason, even with the most advanced compression techniques presently available, noise is introduced into the decompressed signal. This noise or picture degradation, in part, appears as fuzziness along the edges of the moving objects in the picture. Therefore, in order to improve the quality of the picture and/or sound, it is necessary to filter the decompressed signals by identifying and eliminating or minimizing the amount of noise causing the picture and/or sound degradation. This has presented a problem in the prior art.